Michael Winship: Kent State and the Frisbee Revolution

Michael Winship

Wednesday

May 19, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 19, 2010 at 7:16 PM

I was a freshman at Georgetown University when it happened on May 4, 1970. Most of us didn’t know what had taken place until late in the day. We were in class or studying for finals, so hours went by until my friends and I heard the news. On that warm spring Monday, the Ohio National Guard had opened fire on an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University and four students lay dead. Nine others were wounded.

I was a freshman at Georgetown University when it happened on May 4, 1970. Most of us didn’t know what had taken place until late in the day. We were in class or studying for finals, so hours went by until my friends and I heard the news. On that warm spring Monday, the Ohio National Guard had opened fire on an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University and four students lay dead. Nine others were wounded.

By the next morning, groups of students gathered around the campus taking about Kent State and the events leading up to the killings. A few days before, President Nixon had announced the invasion of Cambodia, justifying the so-called “incursion” as necessary to protect our troops in Vietnam. Protests had broken out at schools all over America. With the Kent State deaths, we wondered what to do — and what would happen — next.

By mid-week, two parallel strategies emerged: a national strike that would shut down the country’s colleges and universities — both as a protest and to give students the freedom to devote all their time to mobilizing against the war — and a massive rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, May 9. Because we were already in D.C., much of the rally logistics fell to us and the other colleges in town.

I volunteered to be a rally marshal, directing crowds and hoping to prevent violence. On the main campus lawn, we were given a crash medical course in how to cope with dehydration, tear gas attacks and gunshot wounds.

At breakfast Saturday morning, with macho-laced concern, we told our girlfriends to stay away from the rally; there might be trouble. Instead, we suggested they go to the protest headquarters to help out. As it turned out, they wound up more in danger than we were — a small group of neo-Nazis attacked the rally offices. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt.

As for me, I was given a powder-blue armband and stood with other marshals on the periphery of the 100,000-person rally, enjoying a lovely sunny day. For its protection, the White House had been ringed with D.C. Transit buses parked nose to tail.

Nothing happened until late in the day, when an army water truck came barreling toward us and we linked hands, as if that somehow would ward it off. In fact, the truck veered away just before it reached our paltry line of defense. In the next day’s paper, I read that the vehicle had been hijacked by Yippies and was last seen barreling across a Potomac River bridge into the wilds of Virginia.

And then it was over. The mobilization that was supposed to continue with the close of school fizzled out. Most Georgetown students took advantage of the early end of the semester to bask in the sun and play on the lawn or simply go home. A friend wrote an editorial in one of the campus newspapers headlined, “The Frisbee Revolution.” Those of us who were trying to keep the protests alive were annoyed at the time, but he was right. Once the impetus of the big rally was over, motivation vanished and kids went back to being kids. The war retreated, out of sight, out of mind. But it went on for another five bloody, futile years.

Despite all the anger and worry today — an economy in shambles, the loss of jobs and security, wars continuing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a dysfunctional government hobbled by the stranglehold of campaign cash and political hackery — there’s a similar lack of interest afflicting many of those who rallied to the cause of Barack Obama in 2008, knocking on doors, contributing money, voting.

With that exciting and historic election over and done, the attention of many of them wandered elsewhere, consumed by self-interest or distracted by media’s oxymoron, reality TV, where ex-astronauts dance with chorus girls and parents juggle eight children under the omniscient gaze of the camera.

Thousands recently marched on Wall Street to protest the cynical abuse for profit perpetrated by banks and corporate America. On May 17, others will march on Washington’s K Street, where lobbyists roam, not free, but in pursuit of princely paychecks from those who seek influence and clout.

All well and good. But in the great America elsewhere, the Frisbees are flying.

Michael Winship is president of the Writers Guild of America, East.

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